As your new invention comes to light, your initial thought may be to let the world know. While shouting your success from the rooftops is appealing, before you do, you need to consider how best to protect what you have worked so hard to develop.

Patents and copyrights can offer you some security, but don’t always mean that your design is completely protected, as copies can certainly emerge. There are, however, a number of other options available to you, each with their own strengths.

Below, 10 members of Forbes Technology Council weigh in on some less-common, yet still effective, ways to protect your intellectual property. Here’s what they recommend:

1. Don't File Patents

The most uncommon way to protect intellectual property is not to file patents. Filing patents provides the recipe of how a product or service can be created. Once a recipe is published, one can create a similar product with workarounds to not violate the intellectual property rights. The second method is to standardize the idea with a standards association, so that others are blocked from creating such an idea. - Naresh Soni, Tsunami ARVR

2. Run Lean And Fast

Innovation in the tech sector will always be prone to plagiarism. To some extent, that's what drives innovation's evolutionary jumps in such quick succession. Having relentless innovation cycles keeps your competitors constantly catching up. That does require your company to run like an Olympic runner — lean and fast. - Daniel Hindi, BuildFire

3. Separate Teams

Our engineering teams are separated geographically, and we make a point that none of these teams have access to the complete product. In order to undermine the security and sanctity of our product, several of these teams would need to work together to steal the total product. Separation of duties is a basic tenet of information security, and we have to practice what we preach. - Tim Maliyil, AlertBoot

It may seem counterintuitive, but one of the best ways to build a competitive advantage is to open-source your technology and tap into a broad community of developers. This way, your company can focus on the added value on top of the technology stack that remains proprietary, and can execute with speed and agility. - Winnie Cheng, Io-Tahoe LLC

5. Avoid Joint Ownership

Make sure to avoid joint ownership of intellectual property at all costs. Joint ownership creates problems later on that could make it difficult to protect, hurting all parties involved. - Chalmers Brown, Due

6. Get Exact-Match Domains

If you can, one of the best intellectual property securement methods for trademarks (that you actually own) is an exact-match domain name. While a costlier objective in the short run, the windfall of benefits in the long run is unrivaled. - Michael Gargiulo, VPN.com

7. Safeguard With Strong Access Control

Store manuscripts, creations and all ideas in a safe place that’s protected by an identity and access-management solution. With 81% of breaches being due to compromised credentials, it’s essential to store intellectual property on a system that uses adaptive authentication with risk analysis, or at least two-factor authentication. Passwords alone are obsolete. - Keith Graham, secureauth.com

8. Get Strong Non-Disclosure Agreements

Get assistance with creating well-written non-disclosure agreements. Also, look at any other agreements you use in your business to make sure they cover your intellectual property. These could include employment agreements, licenses, and sales contracts. - Muhammed Othman, Calendar

9. Keep It Quiet And Out Of Sight

Classic ways of protecting IP often involve patenting or copyrighting works and techniques, and vigorously defending them in court. Modern techniques involve using Digital Rights Management systems. A now somewhat uncommon way that is still effective is to simply keep things secret and limit exposure to the trade secrets that make up the IP, and design the system to keep them hidden. - Chris Kirby, Voices.com

10. Publish It Widely With Attribution

While patents require being the "first to file" in the U.S. these days — and that's still the best way to protect your non-trade secret IP — another common way to ensure that your IP is seen as yours is to publish and reference it widely, always ensuring that your company's name is attributed to where it is mentioned. The more you are seen online with your IP, the more support your patents have. - David Murray, Doctor.com